Trivia I find Ignored

Piracy Reloaded

It was a usual day, surfing the net, my only form of entertainment, (Pathetic, I know). I prepared myself for a daily chore, opened the bookmarks tab, the list of blogs I follow. And with a weary yawn, clicked on a favorite – for some reason, I feel awkward sharing the name – *sigh* complexes, complexes. So anyway, I suddenly had this urge to get a drink, after a long day, you just want to forget everything else and relax. No worries. (I looking for coke, I’m 16 you know), I didn’t wait for the webpage to load. I got up and into the kitchen to find the coke, couldn’t find it – figures my intentions weren’t pure. Going back empty handed was not an option. So I decided to fix something up, a quickie. And in like 15 minutes I had prepared enough to last an entire day. Let the cooks be jealous.

As I got back in the room, the living room, not my room. I don’t have a room. (It’s not that we don’t have the money, my parents think too much privacy is bad for health – pimples! they say). I got behind the chair, took a mouthful of macaroni and stared at the screen, in horror.

I instantly recalled a conversation I had with a wannabe IT professional friend, in the 10th grade.

“Get an anti-virus.”

“—What now?”

“It protects you from viruses.”

“Like an injection?”

“Sort of.”

“Is it important? Oh, never mind – which hospital now?”

“Are you kiddin’ me?”

“Who? Me?”

“Dude, I’m talking about a software that protects your computer from alien software.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but my expression spoke my mind, he cut in,”…and for God’s sake don’t start about spaceships now, there’s a limit to stupidity.”

“OK OK, I get it, but I’ve been running it for what, 3-4 months now, no problems yet!”

Getting all dark and sinister,

“You never know…, all those…uhm…’videos’ you watch, anyone of ’em may contain some virus.”

My face got red as I figured out what he was saying,”I do NO such thing!”

“Save the a-“, his voice trailed off as he gazed at a hottie passing by. Disgusted, I left.

Since that day, I’ve had a constantly increasing fear of internet viruses. Although I’ve had everything under control since day 1, I figured it would do no harm to get some info on these viruses this guy mentioned. ‘The blue screen of death’ is a well-known virus constantly brought up over the web. All I got was a general idea of what this is, and at length, it took root in my brain as a mystifying work of art.

As I looked at the black screen that looked so much like the feared blue screen. I thought, maybe it changed colors, I mean, how long could it possibly take for a screen to make a change colors? 4th? 5th millionth part of a second?

When a bit less aghast, I got a good look at what was actually written on the black page.

A protest. SOPA.

I suppose nobody is as behind as me on current affairs? I hope not, because I can’t find the strength nor the willingness in myself to ramble on about the atrocities of this monstrosity, drinking at 3pm does that to you….I found the coke, Geez!

As far as I could infer, bottom-line is, this bill stops online piracy – or wants to stop, whichever you prefer. This is generally considered a good thing, and all the arguments posed against it argue about the limitations it would put on internet freedom of speech. (It took all my effort not to copy/paste from wiki, give me credit)

Nobody is defending piracy. Its a bad thing, I know. But lets face it, when you live

My favorite band of thieves.

in a country such as mine, hardly anything is not pirated. Be it games, windows, photoshop, consoles, you name it! We’ve got it all.

I can’t say if this bill is just or not, though judging by the humongous number of applications filed against it, I can only assume it’d be nothing less than a nightmare, if passed.

But considering the number OF think-tanks we have over at the dark side, even if this thing becomes law, hackers have ways, otherworldly ways to do seemingly impossible tasks.

I can’t help but have faith in the ability of these magicians, they’ll come through, again, as always.

I know, most of you wouldn’t agree, I totally get that. At least we all agree on that, right? But please consider, when the shipping price is 3 times the actual product, who in their right minds would buy it?

When I saw the word CENSORED on my screen, I wasn’t surprised at all. It’s been on the news here stateside for days, and protests have been mounted right there on Capitol Hill. I heard Wiki was the first to darken its website.

Don’t be surprised that this was an all-American issue….that is, media outlets againts the Internet. Hollywood and big record companies here want to put limits on Internet’s freedom. In a way , I sympathize with them. Hollywood, for example, sometimes spend hundreds if milliions of dollars to give us a good movie,,, then only to be cheated on by viewing the movie for free on the Internet. Maybe all they want is fairness.

But of course I dislike censorship. I like it the way it is. I think ir’s up to Hollywood and other media outlets to look for ways to prevent piracy of their creations. the music industry have , in some ways, solved the problem. We buy songs to burn, and I think everybody’s happy with that.

I know what you’re talking about, the internet is great JUST the way it is! nobody has the right to change that. If its fairness they want, hire better professionals to protect copyrights, don’t change how the internet works entirely…

I hear you… we do like to operate on the positive side of the law, and want the law to be on the positive side of us. Our voices matter, and yesterday demonstrated again how people can make a difference. A number of politicians flipped their stance on SOPA yesterday, so all in all, it was a success.

I’ve a feeling your voice is going to matter, and not just on things like internet piracy.